Review of Aliens (1986) by Do You Even Jay C — 11 Jan 2014

*THE OFFICIAL BETTER THAN JUNO MACGUFF*.

In 1979, Ridley Scott brought us the classic sci fi film, Alien, which opened up to a negative response due to many unexplained phenomenon. Alien brought us The Extraterrestrial Invasion. A new wave of aliens invading earth films came out literally invading cinema. Most of these films, besides Predator, were brushed aside and mnay were forgotten. So, now we have the sequel to Alien with Aliens. James Cameron, who brought us the only good Terminator films, Total Recall, and Piranha 2: Flying Piranhas (A classic in the B-Movie genre), brings us this film. I won't say Aliens was a terrible film because it isn't. It has scenes of pure awesomeness and amazing special effects. James Cameron is a visual director, of course. But the problem always lie within his scripts. Take for account, the 2009 Avatar, another Cameron film, it was beautiful, but it was also very shallow and boring. Then, take Cameron's other film, Titanic.....Sappy, Sappy, Sappy. Aliens, while being very enthralling and fast pace, has a very weak script and ditches the atmosphere of the original.

Aliens happens right after the events of Alien. Ellen Ripley, having surviving the torture of witnessing her friends being helplessly slaughtered, is in space for around 50 years. Just as she is about to finally cope with the horrors, she learns that the aliens' home world has been colonized by humans. The colony's communication with other worlds have suddenly stopped. Due to this, colonial marines are dispatched to check out the area, crawling with your favorite big headed alien! Ripley joins in on the team to help since she has had a lot of experience with this type of thing. As they arrive, they soon find out the colony has been ransacked by those lovable Xenomorphs. Soon, they are left in a fight for their lives, with Queen Xenomorph out looking for "the one". Sigourney Weaver stars as our pretty awesome female lead, Ripley.

My problem with this film is the fact that it ditched the eerie, creepy atmosphere the first Alien had. The dread in every scene in that film really set a standard for, not only horror movies, but alien movies in general. This film pretty much has more of a war film-like take on that. It has no dread, but it is overdosing on testosterone. Also, the first film had very few aliens show up whereas this had like an army of those aliens. A major complaint I had with this film was the characters. They were your typical jarheads who only enjoy blowing things up and going "AMERICA!!!!!", even though I'm not sure America even exists anymore (in the film). Also, the way many people die are by getting burned by the acid blood. No one remembered the fact that these things bleed acid? Their too stupid to insult.

Also, there is this little girl named Newt, who is absolutely useless in the film. I guess she was in there to try and make Ripley seem humane, or something, but it fails....it fails pretty badly. She has dry attempts at some humor, but I definitely didn't crack a smile or anything. I was literally hoping that some alien would just gobble up Newt and we wouldn't have to deal with her. Oh, but this is the '80s where children are seemingly invincible to killers. I actually commended Alien 3 for having the balls to kill off Newt. It wasn't better than this film, but it at least went for something unexpected. The script is also devoid of any memorable lines. You know that whole "Game Over man" line? It was improvised, meaning the actor came up with that on the spot. So Cameron didn't create the iconic line, the actor did.

Overall, while Aliens is a technical marvel, especially considering the time period, it can't help but feel inferior to Ridley Scott's horror epic. It has some bland characters, who do idiotic things and never seem to learn. Newt is the female Jar Jar Binks/Jake Lloyd hybrid, even though she was before them. And there is some laughable attempts at acting from the marines. James Cameron, I'm a fan of Terminator 1 and 2, and I enjoy True Lies and Total Recall as guilty pleasures, and Piranha 2 is a classic B-movie, but this is bad. It is very bad. It's nowhere near as bad as say Titanic (1/10) or Avatar (2/10), but it's nowhere near Terminator 1 (8.5/10). I'm telling you Cameron: "That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?".

4/10.